history and legend—“Der alte Barbarossa, der Kaiser Friederich.” Not less affecting in its way was the discovery of a little patch of snapdragon flowers on the ruined walls of Belfort Castle. We were informed that the plant is not elsewhere found in Syria, and the likelihood is that some Crusader’s lady brought it from the garden of a far-off French or English home.
The Crusader was at once the dreamer, the worshipper, and the fighter of the Middle Age. The knight was not indeed the sort of man whom at first sight we would suspect of dreaming. Could we see him riding down the street to-day, we should probably be reminded of some village blacksmith on a Clydesdale horse. Yet he had been dreaming dreams and seeing visions. He was a gentleman and a man of feeling, though he had his own rough ways of shewing it. Part of what had set him dreaming was the instinct of travel and the literature of travel which in those days was so quaint and picturesque. No doubt this travel literature was largely due to pilgrims, but there were others then who could play no tune but “Over the hills and far away.” Travellers’ half-remembered and exaggerated adventures conspired with the fantastic imaginings of the untravelled rustic to create that magic land beyond the horizon where giants, monsters, and devils had their home. All the wistfulness, the dream, and the desire of the ancient days are there. The chroniclers of the time before the Norman Conquest are the most fascinating of geographers, and the singers of Arthurian romance in the later days of the Crusades arrived at a geography which was an utter bewilderment, the result of ages of vague travel and rumours from the Syrian seat of war. Babylon and Wales and places with names wholly unpronounceable are in sublime confusion, and the geography in general is that of Thackeray’s Little Billee, who saw from his mast-head “Jerusalem and Madagascar and South Amerikee.”
Jerusalem always came first. “The Crusades,” as Sidonia says in Tancred, “renovated the spiritual hold which Asia has always had upon the North.” The spell of the East had come upon the West, and in that there lay a reason for the Crusades deeper than any commercial or even military attraction. The West was waiting for it. Behind the British men of the twelfth century lay a heredity of patriotic legend connected largely with the battle of Christianity against Paganism under Arthur. There lay the foundation of much that was best in the crusading enthusiasm. On their own soil they had followed the King and fought under him for Christ. But to satisfy the hearts of these rough men it needed more than all such practical life could yield them, even when that life was so exciting as it was then. There is an infinite pathos in the dream that was coming to clearness through those years. Discontented with the glories even of Arthur’s court, longing for a spiritual something which might give to chivalry its finest meaning, they sought the Holy Grail. Until, well on in the twelfth century, the shadowy figures of Walter Map and Robert de Borron formulate the romance,[29] we see it growing out of old pagan legends baptized by Christian missionaries and blended with Bible stories. It emerges at last in the romances of the French Trouvères, the summit and flower of all past idealisms, the spiritual secret and gist of life, and the chief end of noble men. This is all well known to those who interest themselves in that spiritual search which is the main business of choice souls in all ages, and which in that age took literary form in the Grail Quest. But to us it is specially interesting to note that the century whose later years received the Trouvère legend from Chrétien de Troyes began with an event but for which that legend would never have assumed the form in which it appeared. In 1101 Cæssarea was besieged and taken by Baldwin I. “It yielded a rich booty. Among other prizes was found a hexagonal vase of green crystal, supposed to have been used at the administration of the sacrament, and now preserved in Paris. This vase plays an important part in mediæval poetry as the Holy Grail.” The visionary aspect of the Crusades is that which continually obtrudes itself as one reads their history. Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata is full of it. Even so rough and boisterous a hero as Richard is obviously a dreamer also. Nothing in all this history is more striking than that fateful day when, after marching to within seven leagues of Jerusalem, Richard commanded his army to halt, and courted their murmurs during a month’s unaccountable inaction. Performing unheard-of feats of valour in minor sallies, he could only weep when he beheld the towers of the Holy City, and after routing Saladin’s army in a great battle at Joppa, negotiated a truce and wandered off to shipwreck and imprisonment, commending the Holy Land to God, and praying that it might be granted him to return again and recover it.[30]
As worshippers, the Crusaders are famous figures in the Holy Land. It is hard to reconcile the tales of wild debauchery which followed almost all their victories, with the obviously genuine religious enthusiasm that swept the hosts down weeping on their knees when they caught first sight of Jerusalem. Yet the worship was sincere, and there were pure and gentle spirits among them whom victory did not demoralise. They are always, indeed, armed worshippers—at first a religious soldiery, afterwards a military priesthood, as Stebbing puts it. This composite character is well brought out in the two orders of knights, the Hospitallers and the Templars. The former, working for the sick in the Holy City, wore a black robe with a white cross upon the breast of it, but when there was fighting to be done they covered this with a surcoat of scarlet on which a silver cross was embroidered. They lived simply, contenting themselves with such lodging and fare as were offered them, and they were bound to keep themselves provided with a light which must always be kept burning while they slept. The Templars pledged themselves in even stricter vows, and were warrior-priests in the most literal sense of the term. On the summit of Mount Tabor there is the ruin of a Crusader church, whose broken walls still enclose the sacred space where once men worshipped. Spacious and strongly built, the ruin has a severe grandeur of its own. In the chancel an altar has been rebuilt, and an upturned Corinthian capital set upon it, in the centre of which is fixed a heavy iron cross. That iron cross seems to sum up in its grave symbolism the very spirit of the Crusades. Many of their churches were reconstructions of older Christian edifices, and most of them have been transmuted into mosques, so that their ecclesiastical architecture still remaining is as composite as their character and their enterprise. Yet enough remains of what is distinctively their own to show at once the massive strength and the decorative beauty of their buildings. Its strength is that of men who were accustomed to build fortresses; the buttressed walls are of immense thickness, and the mortar is sometimes harder than the stone. Its beauty has been defaced by the mutilation of much fine work, but from what is left we know how well they carved; and there is a certain high solemnity about their arches and columns which tells of men whose minds were large, strong, and real.
One curious fact, to which Conder often directs attention, is constantly perplexing the traveller. Their identifications of sacred sites are those of men whose enthusiasm far exceeded their knowledge. Had they taken time to consult the Scriptures, or to read them with any thoughtfulness, countless errors would have been avoided. But the soldier instinct is very far from the critical, and they were impatient to find the sites they wished to see. Anything was sufficient for a clue. The name Jibrin suggested “Gabriel,” and a great church arose in honour of the Archangel. Athlit was near the sea-shore, and the Crusaders who lived there found Tyre and Capernaum in its immediate neighbourhood. For reasons equally cogent, Shiloh was brought within a mile or two of Jerusalem, Shechem became Sychar, and the heights of Ebal and Gerizim were recognised as the Dan and Bethel of Jeroboam’s calves. Most curious of all, the little hill of Jebel Duhy, on whose summit you look down across the valley from the top of Tabor, was named Hermon, for no other reason than that a psalm places the two together in its promise that “Tabor and Hermon shall rejoice in Thy name.” Altogether, these worshippers were in too great haste. “Crusading topography is more remarkable than reliable.”
Great as the Crusaders were in dream and in worship, it is their fighting that remains for ever most impressive and most characteristic. Of no men in history is the verse truer, in spite of all their extravagances—
Know that the men of great renown
Were men of simple needs:
Bare to the Lord they laid them down
And slept on mighty deeds.
Looked at from a distance, the Crusades very generally wear the aspect of a stream of vivid colour—a spectacular progress of Europe through a corner of Asia, whose main feature is its brilliant picturesqueness. On the spot the quality in them which is by far the most impressive is their stern reality and fighting weight. The Crusader was doubtless one who in his time played many parts, but whatever else he was, no one who has seen the remains of his work will question that he was at least “a first-class fighting man.” The figure of Richard, as it is preserved for us in the records of the older historians, may be more or less apocryphal, but it is at least true enough to crusading ideals, which must have found many an actual realisation in these strong and fearless soldiers of the Cross. We read of amazing captures of booty; of single combats in which “the King at one blow severs the head, right shoulder and arm of his opponent from the rest of his body”; of a conflict in which only one Christian perished, while “the Turks lost seven hundred men and above fifteen hundred horses.” At Joppa the king leaps out of his ship before it can reach land, and rushes on the enemy. Three days later he and his knights are surprised and have to fight half-naked, some in their shirts and some even barefoot; yet they win. At another time we see Richard plunging alone into the midst of the hostile army, and fighting until Saladin’s brother sends him a gift of two Arab war-horses to enable him to fight it out. Altogether such a hero was he, that the Moslems asserted “that even the horses bristled their manes at the name of Richard.” No wonder if in the popular imagination he became for England hardly distinguishable from that St. George who had already been identified with Perseus, who on these same sands had fought the dragon for Andromeda.
The grandeur of crusading warfare lingers in the mighty ruins of their castles. Nothing could surpass the impressiveness of these castles, seen on hill-tops from below, combing the sky with the sharp broken teeth of their ruined towers, or rearing a black “mailed head of menace” against the stars. Many of them are on the sites of older fortresses, and actually stand on Jewish or Roman foundations. By far the most imposing of such castles is that of Banias, which crowns that spur of Hermon at which “Dan leaped from Bashan” long ago. It must have been capable of quartering a small army, and the quantity of broken vessels confirms the impression. Cisterns, vaulted and groined archways, mosaic floors, dungeons, and every other luxury of their European homes had been imported hither.
The Crusaders ran a line of fortresses along that western edge of the Jordan valley where Israel, as we saw, failed to protect the mouths of her gorges. Belvoir, “the Star of the Wind,” guards from its lofty promontory the passes immediately south of the Sea of Galilee. Bethshan itself, where the Canaanites lingered to the standing shame of Israel, shows the well-preserved remains of a crusader bridge and fortress. Not less striking is the sea-board line of castles. Not only in such old localities as Tyre and Sidon, Cæsarea and Joppa, did fortresses arise, but on at least two quite new sites—those of Athlit and Acre.